Death has its own anesthesia...

My mother took her nurses training when I was a child and worked the 3 to 11 shift in the ER for years.  She tells of the first time she witnessed a death.  She was terribly upset and distraught but knew she had to get past these emotions if she was to become a professional and competent nurse.  One of the doctors in the ER saw how the death was effecting her and took her to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a talking to.  One of the things he said to her that stuck with her and helped her to keep going was that:  "Death has its own anesthesia."

This was in the 1950s but the doctor has been proven right over the ensuing years. As medical science has gotten better at resuscitating  patients who at one time would have died from injury or illness we have all become increasingly familiar with what is called the Near Death Experience.  All of the aspects of the NDE can be and have been explained by science without recourse to the supernatural.  I'm not interested or competent to write a full article on the subject but would refer you to 50 popular beliefs that people think are true by Guy Harrison as a good entry level discussion and the books listed at the end of each chapter under the headline Go Deeper on a variety of subjects including NDEs.

For my purposes I want to zero in on the peacefulness of the dying process.  The 'anesthesia of death' as the doctor explained it to my mother years ago.  As blood flow slows and ultimately stops leading to cellular death of the brain NDE reports often relate a sensation of extreme peace rather than continued agitation, panic and even terror as is experienced when the brain is still fully functioning and fighting to cling to life.  

A NDE is what Alan Segal in his brilliant work Life After Death:  A History of the Afterlife In Western Religion refers to as a Religious Attributed Altered State of Consciousness or RAASC.  That is to say, an ASC that occurs then is given religious imagery by our own minds and with the help of others to bring it in line with the common religious belief of our culture.  The alternative is a Religiously Inspired Altered State of Consciousness (RIASC) in which the individual takes extraordinary measures with the full intent of forcing himself/herself to have a 'spiritual experience.'

Often the person experiencing a NDE comes back with a changed attitude towards life.  This is reported both in cases when the NDE formed the basis of a RAASC or when it did not.  The person is, briefly at least, unafraid of death.  All Altered States of Consciousness are just that:  an alteration in our consciousness through which we perceive the world, not a revelation of a spiritual or supernatural world.  As such the impact brought about by such an experience tends to fade and disappear unless the person engages in a conscious and active attempt to cling to the feeling as the conscious mind begins to reclaim its rightful place as our only window on the world around us.

This relaxing of our fear of dying brought about by physical trauma to the brain as the upper levels of our mind are shut down through lack of blood flow indicates this fear is a product of our environment rather than innate.  I would suggest the philosopher Stephen Cave's book Immortality as further reading in this area.  Cave makes what I believe to be a common mistake however when he relates the survival instinct to a questing after immortality by simply not dying.  The fact that people fight to stay alive shows they full well understand, no matter what they our told by their religion, that death is final and there is no afterlife or coming back.  It's acknowledging your mortality and living a life with that knowledge not as a peripheral comment on the end of life but as the basis for life itself.  Back to Alan Segal and the relatively late introduction of the concept of immortality into the religions of the West for more on those ideas.  But Cave's work is not to be dismissed.  His conclusion more than makes up for this slight misstep.

Fear of death, and religion itself, is a function of the human imagination.  As a Christian Atheist (oxymoron, of course, but one that clarifies which God doesn't exist) I would offer two quotes attributed to the self-proclaimed apostle and proto-Gnostic Saul/Paul (Elaine Pagels The Gnostic Paul is good for further reading on that subject).  

First, he shows the innate flaw in Pascal's Wager when he says:

"For if in this life only my hope resides then I am, of all men, most miserable."

And in another place:

"The sting of death is sin."

Clearly, religion without an afterlife is a source of misery, not comfort.  The basis of this misery, the 'sting of death', comes from the belief that our sins, as taught to us by religion, not merely the things we personally feel bad about doing, will be un-forgiven and we will suffer eternal punishment.

NDE/RAASCs show that as the higher brain function of the human imagination closes up shop as we die then the misery engendered by religion and the teaching of sin and salvation and damnation leak away from our minds the actual experience of dying itself is rather pleasant even though a permanent, one-way passage from existence to non-existence. 

I have stated in other places:

Atheism makes good on all the promises religion makes and fails to keep.

The NDE leaves many people to have a however fleeting feeling of the absence of the fear of death.  This is brought about through the closing down of the human imagination where high concepts such as religion and immortality dwell and the opening up to the prospect of impending death as something that is not to be feared but rather to be accepted as natural.

Cut off the RAASC tendency and just leave the experience as it is without further explanation attuned to religious beliefs and you are getting close to what the world would be like without God.

A world that we can live in, right now and not after death.  A world without religion, without God, without sin and punishment in an afterlife.  Yes, without reward as well, but the rewards promised in Heaven are now yours to have and enjoy while you are still alive.  And these rewards can be shared with others.  You don't have to send the rest of the world to Hell in order to have Heaven.  

Imagine a world where no one is taught religion.  Where there is no sting of death because there is no sin.  A world in which when we harm someone else it is to the person we harmed that we need to make amends and ask forgiveness. Imagine living a life without fear and shame. Where the greatest moral precept is "Live and let live."

A world in which all people grow up with an acceptance of their own mortality.  A world where we accept our position as animals within a complex biosphere.  A world where we are part of the environment and not some special creature given dominion over the rest of life on our planet.

A world where children are cherished and not abused and used physically or sexually or mentally by religion.

As I write this the bookshelves and talk shows are still fascinated by the alleged vision of Colton Burpo as related by his father Todd in Heaven Is For Real.  That this alleged vision came out gradually over a period of months following his NDE is typical of a RAASC and is guided by his father in an act of child abuse his son may never recover from.

Child abuse?

Most certainly.  In the medical field there is a delightfully whimsical term for a terrible disorder where a parent gets their own emotional and often financial needs met by convincing others their child is ill with all manner of diseases.  It's called Munchhausen by Proxy.  What we have in the case of Todd Burpo is religion at its most vile.  We have a father who is deliberately using his own child in order to create a cottage industry from which he will profit both mentally, emotionally and financially.  

Is it his parental right to do this to his child?

Absolutely not.

Should he be prohibited from doing this to his child by the same sort of laws that are applied to other cases of child abuse?

Yes, undeniably this is what would happen to this monster in a better world.

But we don't live in a better world.  We live in one dominated by superstition where magicians walk on water and dead men return to life.  

Can we take this world and, starting today, move from here into this better world, a world where all of the old gods are destroyed, as the childhood of the human race ends and we as a species become adults?

Yes, we can.  We have only a little over three hundred years in striving to destroy an evil that has had dominance for three thousand years.  Yes, it may take us three thousand years to undo the damage that his been done to our species.  And yet we have already made a good start in that direction.  

Growing up is hard to do, believe me I'm a Baby Boomer and the childishness I see in the generations born since makes us look like sophisticated intellectuals in comparison.  But over the last half of the 20th and the opening decade of the 21st Centuries we have been losing ground.

We can lose, but only if we choose to stop fighting.  

Death is nothing to be feared.  Life is nothing to cling to.

Freedom is all that matters.  

And, as John Le Carre put it:

We have given away far too many freedoms in order to be free.  Now it's time to take some back.

  

Death and Truth

I am not a hard scientist.  My background is in literature and philosophy.  But I am not an academic pontificating from an Ivory Tower with no experience in the real world outside of a university campus.  Everything I say is backed up by years of living out my beliefs on the street where it counts.  If a belief system fails to produce when applied to our lives then it is the system that is at fault and needs revision.  Life is the ultimate test of any theory. My atheism doesn't come from any discussion in a cloistered environment or from reading books on the subject, although I have done more than my share of each.  My atheism comes from knowledge of and an attempt to live out theism in my life.  I spent 50 years of my life struggling to make theism work only to find, at every turn, the belief system did not answer any problems or offer any solutions but rather made my life more miserable and me a far worse person than I would have been without it. Atheism answered all the questions and made good on all the promises that theism failed to answer or to keep.  Not just on paper, but in my life.  I know from personal experience that other people would be far better off if they rejected the primitive belief in God and accepted their own mortality.  When I admitted to myself that I was not an immortal being, that I would one day die and that with my death would come the cessation of my existence, I found the need for God to exist dropped from my eyes like a blindfold and I saw the world as it really was for the first time. So much for my personal testimony.  I'll get more into my experiences later as they are germane to my atheism.  For now this brief introduction will have to suffice. Yesterday's letter dealt with death and 'the lack of alternatives.'  My reasoning was based solely on the evidence and I made truth statements, mainly that death, decomposition and the cessation of existence were obvious facts and that theism was a turning away from the truth and the acceptance of a lie.  The unpopularity of 'truth' talk comes from the theistic misuse of the word.  This situation is exacerbated by the cowardice of contemporary philosophy and the hard sciences in the academic world.  The academic population is only a subset of all peoples and classes.  Their motivation is career advancement and, as such, they are loath to make truth statements that may lead to ridicule from their peers.  So both theist and atheist define truth in the limited sense of being 'absolute certainty.'  The application of the twin notions of infinity and eternity extend the probability of an event occurring or a being existing outwards and inwards, forwards and backwards to the point that nothing can be spoken of with absolute certainty about anything.   Since God is defined as an infinite and eternal being he is the only one who can make comment on his own existence or lack thereof, or so the theist argument goes.  If I make the truth statement 'God does not exist' the counter-argument is I would have to have the attributes of God in order to know with absolute certainty that he doesn't exist.  Because of this conundrum, we have an extended argument over the existence of God that would seem to have no possible resolution. What we have are two different definitions of truth.  The truth that is 'out there,' objective truths based on observation, and the truth that is 'inside me,' the interaction between objective truths and myself.  The problem is the latter should be referred to as my beliefs and the word truth should be reserved for the former. Belief differs from truth. Belief is fixed in time and space.  Everyone knows this.  There is the conversion moment in Christianity where one believes and is saved.  One moment you didn't believe, the next you did.  Belief is an on/off switch, either you believe or you don't.  There is no middle ground.  Doubt, the attempts of the rational mind to regain control over one's beliefs, is looked upon as a disease to be cured, not a habit of mind to be cultivated.  Belief is the cessation of the search for the truth and the substitution of a false sense of certainty that has no referent in the real world. Truth is a dimmer switch taking you from the darkness of primitive superstitions and gradually illuminating the world around you.  Truth is reliable information that can be used as the foundation for further truths yet to be learned.  Truth is an ever-elusive goal that carries us forward into the future.  Belief freezes us at one time and refuses the accumulation of further knowledge.  Truth leads to freedom, belief to stagnation and insanity. Death is the truth not because I need it to be true.  The belief in human immortality is created and sustained by the human need to deny death and live forever.  The motivation for people to believe they are immortal is so strong all religion has to do is tell one lie and they have millions of people turning their back on the truth and willingly giving up their freedom and minds. You have on one side a truth that is harsh and uncompromising and unpleasant to the point that its acceptance makes you a social pariah in a country full of believers... ...And on the other side a belief that is deeply and intensely motivated not just by the promise of immortality but the social acceptance of your surrounding culture... ...then how could you impugn a selfish motive on the former and applaud the latter? That is what is happening in our country.  An atheist gives up everything for the sake of the truth. Christians give up nothing and are, in fact, highly rewarded for their willingness to believe a lie. Yet we are the enemy, the antichrist, and the monster. We are the ones they will come for in the night.

An Elaboration On Truth and Fable

Adam and Eve were offered two choices:  Eat of the Tree of Life and live or of the Tree of Knowledge and die.  The Snake lied to them and told them they would not die.  They ate and this is why Daddy has to work hard in the fields and Mommy hurts so bad when she’s having a baby and Snakes crawl on their bellies.  This was the fable before Christianity weighed it down with all the baggage of Original Sin.

The first step in gaining knowledge is the admission of your own mortality. 

You have to shun the fruit of the Tree of Life in order to partake of the Tree of Knowledge.  

The Snake is the one who says they will not die.  And he's lying to you.  Anyone who tells you that you are immortal is lying to you.

Let me repeat that.

Anyone who tells you that you are immortal, that there is life after death, that you will resurrect from the dead in your own flesh and rule with Jesus in a Thousand Year Kingdom here on Earth is telling you a lie.

It doesn’t matter how old the lie is or how confusingly ornate and baroque the lie has become or how many people believe the lie.

It’s a lie.

When someone who knows no more than you do tells you what you want to hear and you believe it then he is a liar and you are a fool.

Am I claiming that I know more than you do?  No, I’m saying there are only two things we can say with certainty on the subject of death and the afterlife:

We all die.

Nobody comes back from death.

Anyone who claims knowledge beyond those two indisputable facts is lying to you.

Why do I keep hammering on the word ‘lie’?  Aren’t they just of a different opinion than me and shouldn’t I respect their right to believe and teach what they want to on the subject? 

You’re right; I can’t stop people from believing a lie.  But they can stop themselves.  They can begin to learn anew the terrors of freedom, of thinking rather than regurgitating.

When someone tells you wild tales about Death and Damnation, Heaven and Hell, God Versus Satan and that you are at the Epicenter of a Cosmic Battle for your Eternal Soul it’s all very thrilling and exciting, especially that part about you being immortal and that when you die you don’t cease to exist but live on in some ethereal sense to return to your bones at the End of Time and be judged for the Sins of your Life and sent to either Eternal Paradise or Eternal Punishment and that the only way you can avoid Burning In Hell Where The Fire Is Not Quenched And The Worm Dieth Not is to turn your life, money and mind over to him and he’ll see what he can do for you...

...I think I can safely say we’ve left a simple lie far behind and gone deep into the territory of psychotic fantasy.

Here’s the tricky part.  This same person who tells you all this also tells you whoever would come around making you question his fabulous tales is trying to steal your soul and if you listen to him it’s an automatic one-way ticket Down and there’s nothing he or anyone else can do for you.

You’ve got to admire a con game with that caveat inserted to keep the mark on the hook!

Do I sound angry to you?  I hope I do, because I am.  I’ve lost fifty years...a half of a century...of my life when I was a Christian just as surely as I would have if I had been placed in prison for a crime I not only didn’t commit but a crime of which I was the victim!

Death is the truth; life after death is a lie.

I’m not shy about using the word truth.  When the likelihood of an event occurring is ever more increasingly scarce with every minute of every day then refusing the word truth would be like refusing to call a rock, a rock.  In any other species than man, we accept as a given that part of the description of the life form is it’s longevity.  

The sea turtle can live a 150 years, then he dies and does not come back.  My dog will live 12 to 20 years, and then he will die and not come back.

With the human species we can trace the longevity rate from age to age, but in the end we always die.  

And in spite unsubstantiated rumors that must, by definition, be accepted without proof...hell, the less proof the better!  For believing something in spite of tangible evidence to the contract is the ultimate act of faith!

And no one has ever come back.  Sorry, Jesus, but until we perfect time travel and a DNA sample is collected while you were alive (if you ever lived at all) then another after the resurrection (if that even happened) then the premise of my argument applies to you as well.  One of the many high points along the way towards atheism was when I realized and accepted the simple truth:

If it doesn’t happen now, it didn’t happen then.

You want to study the alleged miracles in Christian scripture then you study their modern counterparts.  Faith healing, prophecy, exorcism, glossolalia are all being practiced today.  If they happen now, then we can conclude they happened then.  I spent years in Charismatic/Pentecostal religion and have practiced and experienced all of these things and more.  Not once did I encounter anything that could not be described better and fully without reference to the supernatural.  I have read anecdotal ‘evidence’ (that is to say, the brags and boasts of people whose motivation is to increase their standing in the church they attend) but I have never encountered a single miraculous event in any serious, peer-reviewed publication or while bouncing up and down in a back pew, hands in the air, snot flying from my nose and tears from my eyes…OK, maybe the tears were kind of forced.  

It’s hard to get that thrill you did the first time you did something…sex, the Holy Spirit, LSD….and when you can’t you feel like a failure, the tension builds inside you like the bugs just under your skin that only you can  see…till you take it a little bit further than the time before…just far enough to get that sick thrill.  When I was a witch…I’ve been in every kind of religion they make and some I made up myself…I use to tell people that if you aren’t scared shitless when you were casting a spell then you weren’t doing it right.  

The addictive cycle, the ever increasing risk, all to make the ultimate commitment, to get that thrill you got the first time one more time.  It's why men have affairs and women have vibrators. It's the same in sexual perversion at it is in religion.

Ted Bundy started his career from a chance glance of a woman in an open window undressing set off the cycle of thrill, then dullness and repetition, that ends when the person takes it a step to far.  Ted Bundy ending up raping and murdering women.  The question is, when if he’d walked home that night without seeing the woman undressing in the window?

What if it was you?  What if you saw the woman in the window?  Is there a Ted Bundy inside of you molesting your Inner Child?

I know Evil.  I’ve seen it in others, sure, that’s easy and most of the time other people call Evil isn't Evil as much as irritating.  Spotting it in others…Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Ladin…that’s the easy part. 

Seeing it up close, being in the same room, the same house with it day after day does something to you.

Something bad, something you never come back from.

It's when you realize that you aren't one of the Good Guys.

No, you don’t know Evil till you see it staring back at you in the mirror.

 But I digress…

We refuse to accept that when we die we don’t come back, can’t ‘come back’ because we don’t go anywhere except down the drain on a mortician’s slab.  Hence, death without return is a descriptive of the human species.  

A descriptive is based on all available evidence and can only be changed if evidence to the contrary is discovered.  To describe something is not in the same class as theorizing and is not subject to the laws of probability and, therefore, can be stated as a fact.

A word about probability.  There is an argument against making truth statements of any kind that goes since there is an infinity of probable outcomes then that teapot orbiting the sun could possible be there or, in the extreme, will be there in some alternate universe.  This isn’t an argument at all, just an exercise in semantics. My objection is that this is an imaginative exercise made possible only because we lack the evidence to disprove a fantasy.  I think it was Chris Hitchen’s who re-worded the old cliché “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” by adding the caveat “the absence of evidence where evidence should exist is evidence of absence.”  Probability theory points the way for further study and should not, cannot be accepted as an end within itself.

But to treat it seriously and dismiss it in the case of human mortality I’ll pretend it has value.

Probability theory only functions within an infinite set.  In other words, if you take the universe(s) as your evidentiary group, then anything can happen, has happened and will happen.  In the case of human mortality, we are not functioning in an infinite set.  What we have is a finite set consisting of every human being from Eve to the extinction of our species…another unavoidable, since extinction is evidenced in all species just as all individual members of the species are mortal.  As such, we can make truth statements within the boundaries of the finite set of the human species.  Never mind all those orbiting teapot species that are immortal, we can say as an observable fact we are not included among them.

Remember Philip’s Law:

If it doesn’t happen now, it didn’t happen then.

The corollary of which is:

If it doesn’t happen now, it won’t happen in the future.

The laws of this universe are constants as far as the finite set of the human species.  Just as a miraculous inversion of those laws in a particular incident is impossible and would, in my opinion, lead to destruction of our universe, then we can say with certainty these laws haven’t changed in the 200,000 or so years humanity has existed and will not change in the 200,001 to perhaps a million years before we become extinct although that figure is too high since we are the first species capable of bringing about our own extinction as we seem intent on doing.

The population is every dead person in the world from Adam to Dick Clark.  It is a finite population, therefore we can make positive and negative statements.  In this finite population, what is the percentage of people who have come back from the dead...people with have empirical evidence for?

The answer is zero.  We have a hundred per cent mortality rate as a species.  No one has ever come back from the dead.  How can we be sure?  Investigate cases of claimed resurrection from the dead as we have in our world now.  One would be more accurate to study zombification in Voodoo if one were truly interested in the resurrection from the dead.   

One more slight digression, then I’ll give everyone a chance to tell me what an idiot I am.

Think about Jesus being God Incarnate.  Set up a computer model if you have the skill and inclination.  If the Creator of a Universe were to Incarnate into his own Creation would he not set up an infinite loop that would end in the destruction of the Universe?  

I’m reminded of Robert Heinlein’s Glory Road one of his few attempts, and maybe the only one’ at fantasy.  There is a creature who attacks the gang of intrepid questers (isn’t there always?) who is indestructible by definition.  How do they overcome such a creature?  They feed the creature it’s own tail and continue to stuff the tail in the mouth until he is the size of a beach ball then a basketball then a baseball then a marble then a speck of dust until all that is left of him is a greasy spot on the hero’s hand.  

I submit that the Incarnation upon which Christianity rests is an impossibility just as making a monster disappear by feeding it it's own tail.

Don't know the science that could prove the impossibility of the Incarnation, got a hunch it's out there somewhere.  But I'm no scientists.

I am, in truth, (drum roll please)

An English Major!

And even worse,

With a Philosophy Minor!

As Sheldon put it:

"Oh, the Humanities!"

In conclusion, we die.  We don’t come back from death.  


In order to become a grown, adult human being you must first acknowledge these truths.  Clinging to superstition and fable wastes countless lives to potentials they will never be able to fulfill.


I know it did me.


Atheism is admitting the truth.


The Truth.

Da-da-da-Dah!

But remember or hear for the very first time a lesson that is hard in the learning:

The Truth won't set you Free...


...you have to Free the Truth!